The banks are lined with soldiers warming themselves and cooking their suppers over bright fires, where they are burning chairs, tables, and bits of carved wood or timbers. Coming out of the Dantesque streets, it all bespeaks joy and comfort to us. Near our junk there is a canteen, improvised by a Maltese, where intoxicants are sold to soldiers. I send my men to get whatever liquors they want for our supper, for we need something to warm and cheer us if possible. We celebrate with smoking soup, tea, chartreuse, and I don't know what besides, in our little matting-covered dwelling, tied up this time on the pestilential mud and enveloped as usual by cold and darkness. At dessert, when the hour for smoking arrives in our sarcophagus, Renaud, to whom I have given the floor, tells us that his squadron is encamped on the borders of a Chinese cemetery in Tien-Tsin, and that the soldiers of another European nation (I prefer not to say which) in the same vicinity spend their time ransacking the graves and taking from them the money which it is the custom to bury with the dead. "To me, colonel" (I am colonel to him, as he is ignorant of the naval appellation of _commandant_, which, with us, goes with five gold stripes), "to me it does not seem right. Even though they are Chinese, we ought to leave their dead in peace. What disgusts me is that they cut their rations up on the planks of the coffins. And I say to them, 'Put it on the outside if you will, but not on the inside, which has touched the corpse.' But these savages, colonel, laugh at me." VI THURSDAY, October 18. It is a surprise to awaken to a dark and sombre sky. We counted upon having, as on the preceding mornings, the almost never clouded autumn and winter sun, which in China shines and warms even when everything is frozen hard, and which has, up to this time, helped us to support the gruesome sights of our journey. When we open the door of the junk just before dawn, our horses and cart are there, having just arrived. On the forbidding shore some Mongolians with their camels are crouched about a fire which has burned all night in the dust; and behind their motionless groups the high walls of the city, of an inky blackness, rise to meet the low-hanging clouds. We leave our small nomadic equipment in the junk, in the care of two marines of the Tong-Tchow division, who will look after it until our return, and also our most precious possession, the last of the bottles of pure water given us by the general. The last stage of our journey is made in the company of the French consul-general at Tien-Tsin and of the chancellor of the legation, who are both bound for Pekin, under the escort of a marshal and three or four artillerymen. Our long, monotonous route leads us across fields of sorghos reddened by the early frosts, and through deserted villages where no one is stirring. It is a cold, gray morning, and the autumn country, upon which a fine rain is falling, is in mourning.